I finally got around to making a portfolio of websites that I’ve worked on.

Here is a pilot for a maybe-someday tv or internet show. It features Ze Frank and I rather enjoyed it.

Go to Vimeo (rather than watching embedded) to watch it in HD.

The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

“Microsoft, huh? So it’s pretty easy to use?”  at the 1:56 mark.

The product itself is interesting and may actually be pretty good. But seriously, what were they thinking? The entire Microsoft marketing department is full of fail.

I finished migrating Pleasant Interruption over to WordPress. We begin yet another chapter in the history of Pleasant Interruption which goes back all the way to the beginning of 2005. From Blogger, to b2evolution, to Drupal, and now, finally, to WordPress.

It’s strange, as WordPress never caught my eye back at the end of 2005. Rather, if I recall correctly, I think the main reason why I went with Drupal (and had used b2evolution prior) was that we could have separate “blog” pages(and RSS feeds) for each author but have all the posts aggregate on the main page as well.

Now that I am much more experienced with web programming it seems so trivial to me to simply write a separate template for each author showing only their posts.

In any case, I still love Drupal as a full-blown CMS but the important lesson here is to use the right tool for the right job. And for a blog, nothing comes even close to WordPress. It’s so polished and it isn’t riddled with extra garbage that Drupal comes with. In fact, I love WordPress so much that I’ve migrated a bunch of other sites I manage to WordPress, using it as a basic CMS. I think for all but large community-style websites WordPress totally outshines both Drupal and Joomla(the 2 go-to CMS softwares).

I think what does it for me is the inclusion of a WYSIWYG editor by default. I’ve always loathed Drupal for not having one built in. The main problem with Drupal is that it’s designed by developers, FOR developers. I liken it to Linux whereas WordPress is the Mac. Convention over configuration; as is the (Ruby on) Rails philosophy that I have come to so dearly love. Drupal is powerful, but too powerful for its own good. An end-user of a CMS doesn’t care what the “input format” is. Nor do they care about revisions, or menu links, etc. The language is too techie: “node” and “taxonomy” are two that stick out like a sore thumb.

But WordPress get it. The end user only wants to be able to create and manage content. Leave the technical decisions to the person setting it up and building the theme. But otherwise, all the complicated stuff should be hidden and the user should be presented with a simple, beautiful interface.

So here’s to WordPress, for being so awesome.

This is just a warning to the handful of people that have Pleasant Interruption in their RSS readers that I will be migrating the site over to WordPress sometime tomorrow.

This might break your feeds depending on which reader you use so you may want to check the actual website (pleasantinterruption.com) sometime over the next week to make sure you’re getting the goods.

MacHeist is really well-known in the Mac techie world but not so much when you step just outside of that world. Essentially MacHeist is two things: A form of an alternate reality game (ARG) and a promotion for indie Mac software.

The ARG part involves a series of challenges or “Heists” as they call it that users participate in either alone or as a community – you can complete the challenges yourself but some parts can be insanely difficult, technical, or require obscure knowledge so the community works together by discussing in the forums. Each Heist unlocks some free software (that are normally not free) for the participants and new challenges are revealed. In the end, a steeply discounted software bundle is revealed and a lot of the participants buy it.

Just yesterday MacHeist unveiled a mini-heist as a warm-up to the upcoming MacHeist III. I was poking around thinking of participating but the first puzzle got Mariano’s attention and we were both immediately hooked. We ended up spending four hours solving the 9 puzzles and it was a blast. About 3 of them required fairly technical knowledge and a few required a Mac (to run applications) but all in all it was fairly accessible to non-techies. Of course, you can just cheat and check the forums for answers if you get stuck. We needed a little help on a couple of them but managed most of it.

During the past two MacHeists I sat on the sidelines and only last year did I create an account to sang some freebies without actually working on the challenges. But this year, I’ll be waiting anxiously and jumping in as soon as it begins.

Larry Smith’s blog started back in November and he’s written two posts so far at the end of December.

For those that don’t know, Larry Smith is an economics professor at the University of Waterloo and he’s legendary at least in the UW community. I had my first econ class – ECON 101 (micro) – with him and had him again for ECON 102 (macro). He has taught tens of thousands of UW students and his intro-level economics courses are one of the most popular courses at UW. He teaches economics in a way that is accessible to everyone and most importantly, very enjoyable.

In any case, this is awesome that he has a blog now and I hope he updates it regularly. I’ve been wanting to sit in on his classes just to keep up to date on the world of economics (he begins every class with his “briefing” on the current economic situation) but I haven’t had the drive to walk to campus at night for it.

If you want to have a “competitive advantage”, as he says, over everyone else in this world then I highly recommend you read his blog.